by Anita Shreve
He gets out of the car, buttons his overcoat, tucks in his scarf. The parking lot is slippery; his shoes make elongated footprints in the thin wet covering. He walks to the neck of the drive, scans its length. It is the first night he and Siân will have together, the first time they will be able to sleep in the same bed. They’ve never even been together in the dark. Always before, she has had to leave shortly after lunch to get home to her daughter or to make supper. He feels like a man less than half his age who might never have been with a woman, the promise of an entire night sleeping next to a woman an incomparable gift. Yet even so, he senses as he always does the press of time, of minutes passing already, of a finite number of hours that he will be with Siân before she has to leave him; and that when she does leave him, time will stop, as if he were about to be executed. He remembers, as a boy, lying in his bed, trying to imagine what it would be like to be a condemned prisoner, watching the clock tick away the minutes left of life. It seemed to him the worst imaginable fate—to know precisely when one would die.
They have been together now four times, including their first lunch. Always, since that day, they have met here at the inn, gone straight to the room. He is known now, is greeted warmly on the phone when he calls for a reservation. The last two days they had together, the management put them into a suite that had at its entrance two successive locked doors; Siân joked immediately that they’d been put into a soundproof room. He aches with wanting her, and his body tightens. He looks at his watch for the tenth time in the half hour. He cannot think of her now without also seeing the erotic images they have created together: Siân with her back to him, pressed against a chaste, blue-flowered wallpaper; Siân in a hot bath, the room filled with steam (her glasses, until she took them off, opaque ovals), while he sat, fully dressed, on the lid of the toilet seat, drinking beer from a water glass, watching her breasts float above the waterline. Siân bending her neck while he unzipped her dress, the long line of her white back open to his hand. The muscle of her inner thigh made wet from both of them.
It is not so much, he knows, that he or she, or they together, are particularly skilled or adventurous; it is rather that their bodies want each other, fit, are trying to say something that cannot be said with words. He understands, too, that somehow, at least for the two of them, eros is linked with time. It is in the very urgency of time, the sense that their minutes together are short and numbered, that he must say what he has come to say before she leaves, that gestures and words cannot be wasted. But it is, paradoxically, also in the vast expanse of the lost years—the keen sense, whenever he is with her, of all the days and hours missed, the youthful bodies not known, the thousands of nights he might have touched her easily, without loss, without guilt and anxiety. They will never know together the sense of time squandered. To the contrary, he thinks of their hours together as time stolen or salvaged—time-outs from their separate realities.
He turns in his pacing, faces into the snow, walks in the direction of the parking lot. The inn, in the gloom of the lowered skies, is inviting, the door laced with holly, the windows lit with small electric candles on the sills. He has brought Siân a present, and he will give it to her this evening before they go down to dinner. This will be, will have to be, their Christmas together; he knows they will not be able to see each other again before Christmas, perhaps not again before the new year. He does not know how they will survive the holidays, and thinking this, he feels again the seaweed on the line, the drag of guilt, the chaos of the facts and his inability to sort them out. He has a wife and three children—each blameless, each believing in the rituals of Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, each ignorant of his infidelity. He has betrayed his family in the absolute and common sense of desiring and sleeping with another woman, loving another woman, but he cannot escape the notion that he has betrayed them as well with the debacle of his financial ruin. Within days, unless he can work a deal at the bank, he will have to tell Harriet that they will not only lose the house and all their equity in it, but they will almost certainly have to declare bankruptcy to ward off the creditors who have been hounding him. He hardly knows which is worse—to tell her that he loves another woman or to tell her that he can no longer provide for her as he has promised to.
These large betrayals, he believes, will not be forgiven, but he sometimes wonders if it isn’t the smaller betrayals that are worse. He thinks of the dozens of times in the past several weeks that he has lied to his wife: He left a Christmas party in their neighborhood twice last Saturday night, saying that he wanted to check up on the children, when what he actually did was drive to a phone booth to call Siân, who he knew was alone for the evening. (“This is torture,” he remembers telling Siân that night.) He has surreptitiously poured milk down the sink, then told his wife that he would go to the store for her to make sure the kids had milk for breakfast (surely that cannot be forgiven, he thinks—the use of fatherly love in the service of adultery), when what he intended to do and did do was to drive to yet another phone booth and call his lover. He knows the location of every phone booth in his town and in the neighboring communities. He knows precisely at which phone booths he is likely not to be disturbed, which connect him immediately with AT&T, which are better to use during the day, which at night. He can punch in Siân’s number and his credit card number in seconds, with or without his glasses, in the dark or in the light. He presses the numbers blind, like someone trying desperately to reach his drug dealer.
He wonders, too, not for the first time, how Siân manages in her own home. He can tell immediately, from the way she says hello on the telephone, whether or not her husband is present in the room when he calls. They have had dialogues that would be comical if they weren’t so serious. He talks to her; he asks her questions; she responds obliquely as if answering a phone solicitation from a PBS television station or a political cause. He believes he has communicated more to her, said more to her, in the several weeks they have been together than he has ever shared with anyone. Certainly he has never talked to his wife the way he talks to Siân.
He has never been inside Siân’s home, but when he talks to her on the telephone, and when he thinks of her during the day (a continual series of images and thoughts, interrupted only by a momentary and strenuously willful effort to concentrate on a task at hand or a question posed to him), he tries to envision her life with her daughter and her husband. Sometimes he imagines her in a T-shirt and ponytail, leaning against the lip of a counter, holding a phone in one hand and preparing a meal with the other. Often, when he calls, he shares her attentions with Lily, her three-year-old, who seems to chatter constantly at her feet. He thinks she is a good mother; he likes the way she speaks to her daughter, speaks of her daughter. He has a less clear sense of what she is like as a wife. He cannot bring to focus the image of Siân sitting at a table with another man, embracing another man, lying in a bed with another man. He senses—she has allowed him to believe—that the marriage is not a good one, perhaps never was. She has alluded to an emptiness in the relationship, which he has seized upon and possibly embroidered; and he knows that he has extrapolated from her poetry a kind of deprivation, an emotional desert. She has said little of, and he has not asked about, her sexual life with her husband (though it is this question that haunts him, that seems always to be at the edge of his tongue when he is with her, that he is sometimes afraid that he will, despite his best intentions, ask), apart from her comment early on that she was “frozen.” Sometimes he hopes this means that she and her husband no longer make love; at other times he knows this can’t possibly be true, and that knowledge sickens him. Is it really conceivable that she and her husband have not been together since he first kissed Siân?
He brushes the snow from the top of his head, stamps his feet to shake out the cold. He says aloud, once, the words “Screw it,” as if by that he might ward off a sense of hopelessness that he feels coming upon him now, like gathering fog. He feels it particularly when his thoughts have le
d him to images of Siân with her child, in her home, or when he watches his own children in his own home. He does not want to imagine a life now without Siân, yet he cannot begin to sort out in his mind how a life with her will be accomplished. Even if he were able to walk away from Harriet and his children (which seems to him at times nearly as unimaginable as cutting off a foot), is it at all likely that Siân would do the same? Would she want to do the same? Would her husband just meekly leave the marriage and his farm? Impossible. Then what? Would Siân bring her daughter to Rhode Island to live with him? Could they live somewhere in between? And if so, what then of his business? Even as anemic as his business is, it is still grounded in a particular locale. If he’s ever to salvage it, if he’s ever to wait out the recession, it has to be done within the community. Or would it be possible to set up shop somewhere else?
He hears rather than sees the car coming—the slippery hiss of tires on the drive. He turns, she puts on the brakes; the car skids gently a foot or two. She rolls down the window, her face flushed from her impatience with the weather or (he hopes) with her impatience to be with him. He bends down, kisses her on the mouth. She smiles broadly; she seems as exhilarated as he is to have this whole day together.
“I thought you’d never get here,” he says.
“I’d never not get here,” she says.
He unlocks each of the double doors, follows her inside. There are electric candles at the windows, a fire in the fireplace, a large bowl of fruit on a table between the windows. She turns to him, a look of mild surprise on her face.
“Did they . . . ?”
He nods.
“They know,” she says.
“Of course they know.” He smiles. The fire and the fruit seem an omen—a sign that others have seen them together and approve. She takes off her coat, lets it slide into a heap on a chair. She has worn her hair pinned at the sides, and it falls loosely along her back. There is more gray at the temples than he has noticed before; she seems self-conscious about her hair, touches it, smooths back a strand. Her face is bright from the cold. She has worn a black dress with long sleeves. She sits on the chair, removes her leather boots. The melted snow from the soles and the heels make small puddles on the highly polished wood floor.
He kneels, buries his face in her lap. She puts her hands to the back of his neck, bends her head to his.
He feels the warmth of her thighs at either side of his face, the soft wool of her dress on his cheeks. She is holding him as she might a child, and he wants to weep. What they want seems so simple—time together, a lifetime together, or what is left of a lifetime together—and yet that small goal, he knows, is fraught with endless complications: a maze of responsibilities and commitments, deceptions and betrayals. Why, why, why, he asks himself silently for the hundredth time, couldn’t they have remained somehow connected—in touch, with all that the phrase implies—until they were old enough to find each other again? How maddening that they should have met when they were children and had no control over their lives.
His anger and his grief and his specific lust for this woman fill him with a need so sharp he shudders. He raises her skirt to her hips. He wants to devour her, and he is afraid that he might inadvertently hurt her. He lifts his face to hers so that she can see this. She touches his face with her hands. Perhaps he is weeping. He draws her down off the chair, onto the floor. He moves her skirt up toward her waist, slips off her underwear. He finds her with his tongue, kisses her, caresses her with his mouth. He waits for the tiny sound she makes at the back of her throat, a faint cry of helplessness, as from a small animal, and watches now the delicate arch of her white neck, her head thrust back, her mouth slightly open.
And when she comes, he thinks that possibly the most erotic image of all may be the tilt of her nostrils seen across the long expanse of her body.
“It’s lovely,” she says, turning once for him. The robe is short and silk, ivory, and barely covers her in the back, a fact that makes her laugh and blush at the same time. She sits on an upholstered chair, crosses her legs, and tries to look demure, a task she seems to know is hopeless. The robe falls open slightly, draped just so along the curve of her breasts, and she makes no move to close it. He likes sitting on the bed, looking at her in the robe. He enjoyed choosing it for her, thinking of her in it, though he knows she will have to conceal it when she goes home. He wishes they had a place of their own, however small, so that she could hang the robe in a closet and it would always be there. He wishes he could cook a wonderful meal for her.
“I love you,” she says.
“I know.”
“But I feel bad.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t bring you a present. There was nothing I could find that you could have taken home, that seemed to say what I want to say to you.”
He ponders this. “What might you have gotten me that would have said what you wanted to say that I couldn’t have taken home?”
She smiles, thinks. “A lake, maybe.”
He laughs.
“Or a small country.”
“Possibly this hotel?” he suggests.
“Perfect,” she says. “Or a plane.”
“A plane?”
“Mmmm. And flying lessons.”
“I’d like a biplane. I’ve always wanted a biplane.”
“Or years,” she says.
“How many?”
“Thirty or so.”
“Past or future?”
“Both. How many years do you think we have left?”
His heart leaps. She does think of them together. “My grandfather lived to be ninety-six,” he says, “in full possession of all his faculties. And he drank Jack Daniel’s and smoked half a pack a day.”
“I’ve got it,” she says, looking pleased with herself. “The ideal present. A videotape of us together here when we were kids. Of the whole week. What we sounded like. What we looked like.”
He tries to imagine what she sounded like as a fourteen-year-old, wishes he could, for a moment, hear her voice. “We know what we looked like. From the picture. Anyway, I don’t need a present. I don’t want a present. Your being here is enough.”
“It’s not enough,” she says.
“No. You’re right. It’s not.”
She leans forward, folds her hands across her knee. “I wonder,” she says, “if we had all the time in the world, if we knew we could be together for the rest of our lives, would we not care anymore, would we grow bored with each other—or fight?” She laughs.
“I doubt it,” he says.
“We’ll never know.”
“Don’t say that. Please.”
“And I also wonder,” she says, “if we had been together all this time, what would we be feeling now? Would we be as happy as we are now? Would we even know what we had? Without having known the loss of it, I mean.”
“I’d like to think we’d know,” he says, “that we’d have known all along.”
“You probably wouldn’t have liked me when I was younger,” she says. “You’d have thought me too stiff or too repressed or too serious or whatever. I was a virgin, technically, until I was twenty-two. And even then, I didn’t really get it. I think my erotic life got lost or was buried somehow—possibly by the church. It’s one of the reasons I won’t send Lily, though Stephen’s mother thinks I’m damning her.”
“I lost my virginity when I was nineteen,” he says. “It seemed late at the time.”
He looks away, unwilling to linger on the image of Siân losing her virginity—at any age. “No,” he says, turning back to her. “I’ll tell you this: No matter when I’d met you in my lifetime, no matter when, I’d have left what I was doing or who I was with to be with you.”
A flicker of alarm passes briefly across her brow.
Though he has thought of little else, and he knows now that she has to have thought of this too, they have never actually mentioned leaving their respective homes to be together.
“You know
we have to be together,” he says quietly.
She shakes her head. She says nothing.
“Siân.”
She turns her face away. “Not now,” she says. “Please.”
He takes a breath, exhales. “All right,” he says, “but you know we have to talk about this sometime.”
“I just want this one night to be a happy one,” she says. “Without complications. Or is that not possible?”
“I’m sorry,” he says, getting off the bed and walking to the chair where she is sitting. “It will be.”
He slides the robe gently off her shoulders so that it falls open and along her arms. He kneels, looks at her breasts. They are small and round. Below them there is the curve of her abdomen—from her babies. He bends forward, kisses her belly, then her left breast.
“Is this the one?” he asks.
“What one?”
“On the bench, that first day.”
She thinks a minute. “Yes, I suppose it is.” She gathers the robe across her chest, covering herself.
“They’re small,” she says.
He looks at the crumple of fabric where she is holding it with her hand. “Well, look at it this way,” he says. “They’ll never sag.”
She laughs. “Yes they will.”
“No they won’t.”
He bends to her again.
“They’re little,” he says, “but I know for a fact they like to be kissed.”
“Mr. Callahan.”
